What’s in a mosquito bite? Unlike Eastern equine encephalitis, the viral strain that sickened people in Massachusetts and New York in August 2024, Western equine encephalitis seems to have gone dormant in the United States. Data from the Centers…
The heart of this essay emerged from an exercise that Theo Nestor(opens in new tab), one of my first writing instructors, dubbed “The 26-Minute-Memoir.” You set a timer for twenty-six minutes and write without stopping. Don’t backspace or delete. When time is up, marvel at what your subconscious can do. Mine turned an opening throwaway sentence about being afraid into a series of vivid childhood scenes that I’d never before dared to speak of. That raw material languished for years until I recognized its importance for my upcoming memoir, The Hierarchy of Soup, which delves into the shame of family secrets. By then I had a bit of distance, and I fashioned a chapter out of those scenes.
But to turn that chapter into a standalone essay for CRAFT, my challenge was to broaden the context of my personal story to encompass a universal health concern: mosquito-borne disease. I also wanted to highlight the tension between public health policy and personal responsibility. To do this, I had to bring in the outside world of facts and statistics. But since statistics can be deadly boring, I had to figure out how to sprinkle in relevant facts while not succumbing to my BBC voice. To find that balance, I used the “if it’s boring me, it’s surely boring them” yardstick. While writing, I read those passages aloud and deleted chunks when I heard myself droning. I ran the final draft by my writing group and pared the statistics down even further.
Another craft choice was to use repetition to cement the linkage between the cause and the disease. On first read, the disease—Western equine viral encephalitis—can be glossed over. But by repeating the phrase, first emphasizing the location (western), then the carrier (horses and birds), then the vector (mosquito) and the virus, I hoped to familiarize the language and make the linkage “sticky.” Repetition stresses the importance of specificity. It serves as an echo, a refrain, an ominous intonation. Remember.
Finally, the essay format is an excellent vehicle to raise questions without answers. In this piece, after wandering back and forth between the outside world and past scenes from my life, I’m still searching for answers. On the public policy level: How could this tragedy have been prevented? What are the arguments for protecting horses but not children? On the family level: How does loss echo through a family, especially when it goes unacknowledged? What is lost when memories, even the good ones, are erased? And last, my personal dilemma: How do you live with the fear that some random thing can happen that will break your heart?
AMBER WONG(opens in new tab) is an environmental engineer and memoirist from Seattle who writes about hazardous waste, Chinese-American culture, rowing, and the perils of being a bad Chinese daughter. She received her MFA from Lesley University, her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University, and rowing instruction from Pocock Rowing Club. Being a bad Chinese daughter came naturally. Her work has appeared in Under the Gum Tree, The Plentitudes, Pangyrus, Terrain.org, Solstice, CRAFT (Winner of the 2022 CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award), Creative Nonfiction, and other literary journals and anthologies. Some of these essays have been adapted for use in her upcoming award-winning memoir, The Hierarchy of Soup (Trio House Press, expected publication date: October 2027). Find her on Facebook @amber.wong.129.
